Linguistics of Signed Languages - TRAN854

This unit introduces students to the linguistics of signed languages, with particular reference to Auslan. The unit focuses on language structure (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) and language acquisition and psycholinguistics. The use of signed language corpora in the description of language structure is a central theme of this unit and major corpus-based findings related to language variation and use (sociolinguistics) and language change (historical linguistics) are presented and explored. In addition, students learn how to build a corpus and to apply their existing and newly acquired linguistic knowledge to the computerised annotation and analysis of signed languages.